Ignorance in Leaders is Not Bliss

Former Democratic Missouri Senator and newly minted MSNBC analyst Claire McCaskill has admonished Democrats not to demean Trump supporters. She said she’d “fight anyone” who looks down on the people from her state who voted for President Donald Trump. “I hate it when people in Washington, especially people from bright blue states just said, ‘Well, the only people voting for Trump are stupid people.’ No that’s not true.” Isn’t it? Her words are hard to swallow when so many display unbelievable ignorance.

No less a Republican icon than Bill Kristol, publisher and editor of the now-defunct The Weekly Standard, recently called the GOP The Stupid Party, as did Max Boot, longtime GOP analyst and historian, who has left the Republican party. To quote Boot, “the rise of Palin and Trump means that the GOP has truly become the stupid party.” Examples abound.

In Arizona, a House committee recently passed legislation to address a new category of “youth employment” by lowering wages for everyone under 22 years old. Under the bill, employers would not have to pay workers between 16 and 22 working 20 or fewer hours a week the current state minimum wage of $11 and, instead, would only need to meet the federal minimum of $7.25.

In Maine, former governor and iconoclast Paul LePage has bragged, “I was Trump before there was Trump.” As if to prove this, he recently commented on the need for the Electoral College, and his disdain for the National Popular Vote Initiative, claiming that the College “protects white voters.” He added,

Why don’t we just adopt the constitution of Venezuela and be done with it? Let’s have a dictator because that’s really what you’re gonna boil down to. What would happen if they do what they say they’re gonna do, white people will not have anything to say. It’s only going to be the minorities who would elect. It would be California, Texas, Florida,” he said, predicting calamity with the demise of the Electoral College.

Never one to waste the opportunity to shine, North Carolina Congressman Mark Meadows pulled a stunt in a recent Michael Cohen hearing in which he invited a black woman, Lynn Patton, a former Trump and now HUD employee, to stand silently behind him while he opined that no black person would work for President Trump if he were racist. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib later called him out on this, saying the stunt itself was racist. Meadows threw a tantrum, claiming insult.

In Colorado, the Democratic-held legislature is poised to pass a law requiring that sex education in public and charter schools include instruction on what consent means in sexual relationships, while barring schools from using abstinence-only curriculum. Enter a GOP lawmaker, State Rep. Perry Buck (R-Greeley), taking issue:

You cannot do a one-size-fits-all. My district, the unincorporated, God bless them all, don’t want to be told what they think is consent, what they think is their curriculum, everybody has different degrees.